A Tigress, Five Cubs and a Fox That Rolled in Tiger Urine: Inside China's Siberian Tiger National Park
China's flagship tiger reserve opened its gates to a traveling press corps this week, and the tour produced a status report from the country's wildest corner: a tigress rearing five cubs toward independence, and official confirmation that a fox really has been borrowing a tiger's fearsome reputation.
The Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park is not usually open for visitors — 14,100 square kilometers of forest on the Russian border, closed to casual foot traffic precisely because it is working. This week it was opened to a traveling press corps instead: a joint media tour organized by the Central Propaganda Department and the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, launched in Changchun on October 10 and trending on Weibo ever since, as reporters file dispatches from inside China's wildest reserve.
The star of the tour is a mother. In November 2025, an infrared camera in the park's Hunchun section recorded a wild Amur tigress moving through the trees with five cubs in tow — the first time six wild Siberian tigers have been captured in a single frame in China. People.cn's reporters filed the status update this week: three of the five cubs are now living independently, and the remaining two are expected to go solo by the end of November.
The tour's viral moment, though, belonged to a fox. Video had circulated of a fox trailing a tiger and rolling in the spot where it urinated, and the park administration's general affairs director, Chen Xiaocai, was asked about it directly. "The old idiom really does have a live case in the forest," he said. Wild animals' noses are extremely sharp, he explained; the fox uses the scent and menace of the tiger's urine to keep other predators away. "Our ancestors were not deceiving us." Weibo users replied that the primary-school textbook, home of the idiom 狐假虎威 — the fox that assumes the tiger's might — had been vindicated.
The report card is the tour's larger point. The park, established in October 2021 as one of China's first five national parks, spans Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, and the tour is timed to the program's first five-year accounting: CCTV's coverage paired the tiger litter with news from another first-batch reserve, where the Hainan gibbon — the world's rarest primate — has expanded its family groups. Five years in, the national-park experiment, fencing off vast habitats and policing them against poaching and logging, is being presented to the public with its first measurable returns, and the state's main outlets led their news boards with it.
Two cubs are still with their mother. By the end of November, the park's cameras should show whether they made it on their own — the next data point in a population China is counting one camera-trap frame at a time.